Guest Overview

Tina Kelley describes herself as a cheerful optimist with a morbid streak. She is the author of Abloom and Awry, Precise, and The Gospel of Galore, and co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and she reported for the New York Times for 10 years, sharing a staff Pulitzer Prize for 9/11 coverage.

Tina Kelley grew up in New Jersey to caring loving adoptive parents, her early love poetry. Tina describes growing up in small-town America, the influence of her poetic father, developing her love of poetry, reading, and writing that set her on a path to Yale and beyond as a journalist, poet and author via a detour through the world of NGO’s and Think Tanks.

Tina quotes Thomas Jefferson “If I had to choose between a well-functioning government and a well-functioning press I‘d choose the latter, sunshine is the best disinfectant” to frame her perspective on the decimation of local news media and print journalism, the impact of losing a generation of people asking hard questions of public officials or as she says leaving the pigs at the trough with no one watching.

Tina discusses quality investigative journalism in the world of fake news and voting for optimism and the importance of the hyper-local journalistic model.

We discuss the resurgence and importance of local communities, her mixed views of Facebook, and the innovation of the Clear Health Costs startup and how it is disrupting the inequities of the pricing in the US health system.